Indexing of internal search results: canonicalization or noindex?

[ClassicDriver]

Hi Mozzers,

First time poster here, enjoying the site and the tools very much.

I'm doing SEO for a fairly big ecommerce brand and an issue regarding internal search results has come up.

www.example.com/electronics/iphone/5s/ gives an overview of the the model-specific listings. For certain models there are also color listings, but these are not incorporated in the URL structure.

Here's what Rand has to say in Inbound Marketing & SEO: Insights From The Moz Blog

Search filters are used to narrow an internal search—it could be price, color, features, etc.
Filters are very common on e-commerce sites that sell a wide variety of products. Search filter
URLs look a lot like search sorts, in many cases:
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop
www.example.com/search.php?category=laptop?price=1000
The solution here is similar to the preceding one—don’t index the filters. As long as Google
has a clear path to products, indexing every variant usually causes more harm than good.

I believe using a noindex tag is meant here.

Let's say you want to point users to an overview of listings for black 5s iphones. The URL is an internal search filter which looks as follows:

www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5s?search=black

Which you wish to link with the anchor text "black iphone 5s".

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if you no-index the black 5s search filters, you lose the equity passed through the link. Whereas if you canonicalize /electronics/apple/iphone/5s you would still leverage the link juice and help you rank for "black iphone 5s". Doesn't it then make more sense to use canonicalization?

[GPainter]

Hi there,

Looks like you've gotten to the bottom of it there.  The canonical tag is best as you wouldn't loose any link juice but it would get the desired effect of not indexing the filter.

Looks like you've got a handle on it so good luck!

[ClassicDriver]

Thanks!

I have a follow up question :).

What if there are listings with unique IDs with the following URL structure:

www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs/123456

Then, canonicalizing /electronics/apple/iphone/5gs would prevent the listing from ranking.

What is best practice in these cases? Ideally I would like to pass link juice from the ?search filters to the canonical URL but leave the sub-directories as is.

[GPainter]

Assuming the info is the same content (duplicate) just with a colour etc.

www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs/123456

I would put the tag on that page pointing towards:

www.example.com/electronics/apple/iphone/5gs

What the tag is doing is saying the page (123456) is a duplicate of the another page, here is the other page (the link in tag) then Google will put all relevant juice to the original.

The canonical tag is great for duplicate content but it by putting it on a page deeper in the structure it only affects that page not any others.  You can sometimes get a bit ahead by trying to canonical pages that don't exists like www.exsample.com?yay

[ClassicDriver]

I meant to say that /123456 is an individual listing and /5gs gives an overview of all listings.

Then I could include a canonical tag at /5gs?search=black pointing to /5gs and NOT include a canonical tag at /5gs/123456 because I want the individual listing to rank?

[GPainter]

The tag is good for duplicate content but if /123456 has unique content then you probably don't need the tag on it. I would refrain from trying to implement the tag on ? on larger terms as it will give you a headache.

Some handy tips here- http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

In Short -

Set up the tag on the filters e.g a page that's the same content but its showing the colour blue then it will feed back the juice to the original but if you've got a page that's not duplicate and has content on it then you could leave it be.  Google's pretty clever at working out relationships on pages and duplicate content is not the worse problem for SEO.

Hope that helps!

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Just to round this question off, you could canonicalise the query-string URL searching for black iPhones to the iPhone 5s listings page and keep an individual phone's lising at /123456 separate, yes. It's best to keep the canonical tag for truly duplicated or near-duplicated pages, so you would not want to canonicalise an individual product page to a listings page or similar.